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Bolly dancing Cal’s Hindi Film Dance Team Takes Off By Sandip Roy Growing up in Calcutta, I rarely watched Hindi films. Going to the movies usually meant viewing English language evergreens like Born Free and Willy Wonka. Bollywood was a risqué world with money but little class, where the vamps flashed thigh and cleavage and the heroes kept their shirts unbuttoned. At my school, we had regular haircheck days, at which school staff made sure our locks were not curling over our collars “like some two-bit Bombay film star.” We looked down on its kitschy excess. Now, Bollywood is entering the American mainstream, thanks to movies such as Mira Nair’s art-house hit Monsoon Wedding and the Bollywood-inspired pageantry of Moulin Rouge, Indian beauty queen Aishwarya Rai’s recent U.S. television appearance, and even rapper Dr. Dre’s legal problems for mixing a snatch of an old Hindi song into his single “Addictive.” It’s also hit academia in media courses on campuses ranging from Berkeley to MIT.
“The energy is contagious,” says team coordinator Anita Bhat, a 21-year-old senior in business and political economics. “We once stayed up till 2 a.m. making our props—putting together a tree.” The quintessential Bollywood dance number, you see, has to have a tree for the lovers to run around as they lip-synch love songs with at least 50 backup dancers performing moonwalkmeets- classical kathak stunts in acrobatic, bosom-heaving unison. A fountain (or five) is also good for the obligatory wet-sari sequence, and four changes of costumes—one for each stanza, including a chiffon sari with a backless blouse for a scene set in freezing Himalayan snow—is de rigueur. Slick packaging and modern story lines have garnered the genre a new generation of fans—young Indian Americans born and raised in U.S. suburbs. “I thought Bollywood films were pretty cheesy,” admits Natasha Banerjee, a biology major. Now, as vice president of the Indus Council, a student organization for Indian students at Cal, she was up to her elbows organizing the Hindi Film Dance Competition. In 2001, UC Berkeley was the first school to host a dance competition. Now, the trend is spreading across the country, as teams travel everywhere from Detroit to Los Angeles to take part in contests and even spend $400-$500 apiece out of their own pockets for costumes and other expenses. Though Cal had long hosted competitions for Indian folk-dance styles like bhangra and ras, film dance had never been regarded as a bona fide art form. The problem is that, unlike classical and folk dances, Bollywood dance is a grab bag of styles that defies neat classification. The Berkeley dance team, says Bhat, gets its inspiration as much from a Tamil movie as from the latest Usher video. For team member Sheetal Kapadia, the Hindi Film Dance Competition is not about copying a Bollywood film; it’s really about the team telling its own Bollywood-style love story through six song segments in exactly eight minutes. The dance is “something we can all relate to,” says Kapadia. It’s the romantic tale of the most popular boy on campus, who like any Bollywood hero worth his masala is also a dancing whiz and tries to impress the new girl on the block. But for the team members, the biggest plus is how Bollywood has brought them all together. Parents are especially surprised that the boys are doing something cultural, Bhat adds. After watching female fans swooning before male megastars like Shahrukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan, male students seem little concerned about whether dancing is for girlie-men. Bollywood films, with their often top-heavy patriarchal family values and traditional gender roles in which women routinely make sacrifices for their husbands, might seem a bit of a throw back for a modern Indian-American generation. “But we can make up our own stories that break that stereotype,” says Bhat. “And it’s great for girls to know they don’t have to be nearly naked to be regarded as beautiful.” Sandip Roy is an editor for the Pacific News Service and host of “UpFront,” New California Media’s radio show on KALW 91.7FM in San Francisco. This piece was adapted from a story that ran on SFGate.com. |
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